Healthcare is fraught with numerous issues that require thorough consideration to ensure ethical decision-making. Chapter 7 reiterates how data security in healthcare impacts patient privacy, and chapter 8 reminds us that advances relying on research require particular attention to informed consent in the process. Other sources used in this case study reflect on specific ethical issues, such as physician-assisted suicide (PAS), or reiterate how COVID-19 raises concerns regarding informed consent or data handling. Overall, COVID-19 left a strong impact on ethical issues related to informed consent and physician-patient relationships, while its effect on other ethical aspects of healthcare was not as significant.
The five foremost ethical issues that healthcare professionals face include patient confidentiality and relationships, informed consent, malpractice or negligence, and PAS. The physician-patient relationship encompasses a broad range of issues, largely based on the fairly obvious requirement to maintain the patients’ trust and alleviate their suffering. Similarly, neglect and malpractice are fundamental issues rooted in the unwillingness to live up to ethical principles of beneficence and non-maleficence. Patient confidentiality becomes particularly acute in the age of information technology, which is why the ethical requirement to ensure it becomes all the more important (Morrison & Furlong, 2019). Informed consent is paramount in both treatment and research, meaning that patients need to fully understand the implications of what they agree to and are capable of making such decisions. From my point of view, it is particularly important because neglecting it has the implication of disregarding the patient’s autonomy, as in the Tuskegee syphilis study (Morrison & Furlong, 2019). Finally, PAS raises concerns closely related to the principle of patient autonomy (Sulmasy & Mueller, 2017). Healthcare professionals can and likely will find themselves in need of navigating these issues in the foreseeable future.
The COVID-19 pandemic certainly requires an ethical approach, but not each of the issues listed was directly affected. For example, PAS is usually debated as applied to untreatable and incurable degenerative conditions, to which COVID-19 does not belong, meaning it has little bearing on this particular issue (Sulmasy & Mueller, 2017). The pandemic affects the possibility of malpractice and neglect quantitatively due to the sheer number of cases. The requirements for patient confidentiality are generally the same, meaning the challenge in maintaining them mainly comes from an increasing amount of data handled during the pandemic (McQuoid-Mason, 2020). The importance of building physician-patient relationships based on trust increases considerably when treating a novel disease, especially early on in the pandemic when there was little in the way of established procedures. Additionally, the race to produce vaccines may tempt researchers to sidestep the ethical obligations of informed consent when testing it or even using it before it is officially licensed (Singh & Upshur, 2020). In short, COVID-19 has prominently affected ethical issues of informed consent and patient relationships, while its effect on malpractice and confidentiality was more modest and, in the case of PAS, arguably nonexistent.
As one can see, the effect of the ongoing pandemic on the most common ethical issues in healthcare has been considerable but uneven. Problems of patient confidentiality and relationships, informed consent, malpractice or negligence, and PAS are and likely will remain prominent with or without large-scale pandemics. However, COVID-19 has increased the importance of avoiding neglect and maintaining confidentiality in proportion to the much-increased strain on the healthcare system. Even more importantly, research on vaccines puts additional emphasis on informed consent, and treating a novel disease requires building physician-patient relationships based on trust more than ever.
References
McQuoid-Mason, D. J. (2020). COVID-19 and patient-doctor confidentiality. South African Medical Journal, 110(6), 461-462. Web.
Morrison, E. E., & Furlong, B. (2017). Healthcare ethics: Critical issues for the 21st century (4th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Singh, J. A., & Upshur, R. E. G. (2021). The granting of emergency use designation to COVID-19 candidate vaccines: implications for COVID-19 vaccine trials. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 21(4), e103-e-109. Web.
Sulmasy, L. S., & Mueller, P. S. (2017). Ethics and the legalization of physician-assisted suicide: An American College of Physicians position paper. Annals of Internal Medicine, 167(8), 576-578. Web.